In a July 11 post here on Juicy Ecumenism and in Front Page Magazine, Ryan Mauro announced that the Clarion Project has launched a petition to designate the Nigerian jihadist killers Boko Haram as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). The northern Nigerian group dedicated to eradicating the Christian presence in northern Nigeria and imposing Sharia in the entire country, has been responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Christians.

For several years now, the U.S. State Department has refused the designation for Boko Haram, even though the U.S. House of Representatives and even the Justice Department have urged them to do so. Mauro says, “According to the State Department, if a group is labeled a Foreign Terrorist Organization then it becomes illegal for anyone in the U.S. to provide material support to the group; any financial institution must freeze and report its assets; and members of the group are barred from entering the U.S. and ones that are already here could potentially be deported. It is shocking to think that these measures aren’t already in place.”

Shocking, indeed. But even more shocking is the State Department’s attitude towards Boko Haram as revealed in the Congressional testimony of former Asst. Secretary of State for Africa, Johnnie Carson. In addition, the State Department’s human rights and religious freedom reports go so far as to scold Christian leaders for speaking the truth about the Islamic jihad against northern Nigeria’s Christians by Boko Haram.

The most recent atrocity committed by Boko Haram was the murder of some 42 schoolchildren and teachers in Yobe, Nigeria. Mauro notes, “This is the third attack on a school this month, and we’re less than two weeks in.”

Please take the time to sign this petition. We need to let the Obama Administration that we will not sit idly by while Islamic jihadists kills off northern Nigeria’s Christian population week after week.

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity, is hard at work developing interfaith political alliances. Of these partnerships, Baptist leaders have proven to be among the tightest.

In its latest newsletter, ISNA promotes an article by Rev. Brent Walker, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty. Walker boasts of how his organization stood with ISNA against “misguided congressional investigations of terrorism focused only on Islam.”

The ISNA official that Walker specifically references as a friend is Sayyid Syeed, former ISNA Secretary-General and current director of its Office for Interfaith and Community Alliances. In 2006, he was recorded stating, “Our job is to change the constitution of America.”

This comment is less surprising when you consider ISNA’s background. A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo identifies it as one of its fronts for its “kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” The federal government acknowledged ISNA as a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity when it designated the group as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a “charity” housed inside ISNA. The group continues to promote Sharia.

The Baptist Joint Committee’s website showcases a suit against the NYPD for its intelligence-gathering program by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has connections to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network. The complaint states that the NYPD “imposed an unwarranted badge of suspicion and stigma on law-abiding Muslim New Yorkers.”

In its latest magazine, ISNA attacks the NYPD and makes the ludicrous statement that “Muslim terrorism is not a threat after 9/11.” Walker likewise downplays the threat, saying that although Islamic terrorism “must be resisted with all our might,” he guesses that “99.99%” of Muslim-Americans are patriotic and opposed to extremism.

Unfortunately, polls show there is a formidable Islamist minority. In a 2011 Pew poll, five percent viewed Al-Qaeda very or somewhat favorably. Another 11% said they only viewed the terrorist group “somewhat unfavorably.” Another 14% chose not to answer the question.

Walker provides a review of some of the defining moments in ISNA’s courtship of Baptists. ISNA’s Syeed helped put together the first National Baptist-Muslim Dialogue in Boston in January 2009. One of the leaders was Dr. Roy Medley, General Secretary of American Baptist Churches USA. Other involved groups included the Alliance of Baptists, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Baptist World Alliance. According to ISNA, about 100 Baptist and Muslim leaders participated.

The second National Baptist-Muslim Dialogue sponsored by ISNA was held in December 2012, partially paid for with a grant from the Boston Baptist Social Union. Other sponsors included American Baptist Churches USA, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Alliance of Baptists, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the Lott Carey Foreign Mission Society and the Andover Newton Theological School.

Over 75 Baptist and Muslim leaders took part. Obama Administration officials even came: Rashad Hussain, the U.S. Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Ambassador Suzan Johnson Cook, Ambassador-At-Large for International Religious Freedom.

ISNA’s website lists three Baptist groups as official interfaith partners: American Baptist Churches USA, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Progressive National Baptist Convention. All three also belong to the ISNA-allied interfaith coalition named the Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign. When ISNA officials recently met with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, the Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign was highlighted as one of their top achievements.

ISNA has leveraged its interfaith relationships as a tool to paint its critics as anti-Muslim bigots. On January 15, ISNA sponsored an event about the “Islamophobia Network” at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C. One of the speakers was Rev. Dennis Wiley, co-pastor of the Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ.

ISNA took action when four members of Congress (Reps. Bachmann, Gohmert, Franks, Westmoreland and Rooney) wrote well-documented letters requesting investigations into the relationships between the U.S. government and Brotherhood-linked groups and individuals. ISNA and its allies went into overdrive, generating heaps of negative media coverage of them.

One of the ways they accomplished this was through their interfaith partners. A coalition of 43 interfaith groups wrote a public letter on July 26, 2012 defending ISNA, Muslim Advocates and the Muslim Public Affairs Council of having “long-standing histories of positive and committed work to strengthen the United States of America.”

The coalition said that the letters “betray our foundational religious freedoms.” They vowed, “We will not stand idly by and allow our country to revive federal investigations into innocent individuals based on their religious adherence.”

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty was one of the signatories. The supposedly non-political dialogue with ISNA had political benefits.

UPDATE: Bishop Anis has released a letter about upcoming June 30 demonstrations in Egypt that can be viewed by clicking here.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is this week embarking on his first visit abroad since his enthronement earlier this year. Lambeth Palace says the Anglican official chose the Holy Land because of the region’s importance to global stability.

Welby is “deeply concerned for justice and for the security of all the peoples of the region, and the pressures on its Christian communities,” according to a statement from Lambeth Palace. “In particular he wants to support and honour the work of the President-Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, the Most Revd Mouneer Anis in Cairo; and the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, the Right Revd Suheil Dawani, with whom he will be staying in Jerusalem and who will accompany him on all his visits.”

This spring I met Bishop Anis in North Carolina at the New Wineskins for Global Mission Conference. Bishop Anis spoke on the difficult situation his fellow Egyptian Christians face, especially in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” uprising that toppled former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

“It was like the honeymoon,” Anis described of Egyptian Christians and Muslims joining together to protest corruption, low quality of life, high food prices and unemployment. Women and Christians began to participate in political life, and one man openly proclaimed “I am a convert from Islam, I am a Christian, that is my right.”

Unfortunately, harmony did not endure as Islamist groups asserted themselves. Anis outlined four Islamic groups in Egypt, each a smaller concentric circle within another:

Anis described the majority of Egypt’s Muslim population as “ordinary, normal people without an agenda except to live peacefully.”

Within the Muslim population is a smaller group of Islamists who primarily seek political power. A third, smaller subset of Islamists (Salafis) are more militant than the broader Islamist group, reject the use of modern things and want to return to the ways of the “fathers.”

Finally, a small circle within the Salafis are the Jihadists: militant Muslims who count terrorists among their numbers and “have an agenda to create an Islamic nation – the Caliphate.”

Anis determined that the second group – the Islamists – posed the greatest danger to Christians. While not as extreme as Salafis or Jihadists subsets, the Islamists have a much wider base of support within the population. Usually, Islamists lack the anti-modernist teachings that make the “vocal and self-defeating” Salafis “out of tune” with Egyptian voters, such as opposition to women in the workplace.

Following elections, the Egyptian parliament is now dominated by Salafis and other Islamists that hold about 70 percent of seats, according to Anis. The Egyptian bishop assessed that “people who are not educated are easily moved,” something Egypt’s high rate of illiteracy exacerbates.

“There was disappointment in the hearts of the young people who sought revolution,” Anis reported, cited churches burned and people killed. “All of them are Christians.”

Anis attributed the election of Muslim Brotherhood official Mohammed Morsi, and his predominantly Islamist government, upon “people [who] didn’t want anything from the previous regime.”

The bishop, however, was quick to assert that Morsi was accountable to a broader power structure and was individually not as powerful as might be perceived.

“It became obvious that the Muslim brotherhood leadership had the power,” rather than Morsi himself, Anis reported. The Anglican bishop and other Christian leaders met with Morsi to share their concerns, “He listened to us, but nothing happened.”

The dour situation has not been without silver linings, however: increased difficulty for Christians has also led to increased unity.

“One of the greatest joys [has been] to start the Egypt Council of Churches,” Anis exclaimed. The Anglican leader had high praise for new Pope Tawadros II of the Coptic Orthodox Church, a man who is “very keen for Christian unity.” Welby will meet with Tawadros this week during his visit.

Describing the former pharmacist as a man with “a very big heart,” Anis, himself a medical doctor, praised Tawadros as “a gift from heaven” and assessed that historic differences between Christians of Eastern and Western traditions was dissolving.

Among the issues facing the Coptic church is an exodus of young adults departing for other countries. Alarmed at the departure of 100,000 Christians in 2011 alone, Anis lamented that among them are “the best minds” in the Christian community.

“It is amazing that the Middle East could be a place without a Christian witness,” Anis worried, connecting the link between presence and witness.

“Because we live in a [majority] Islamic country, the only thing we can do to show God’s love is serve society,” Anis added, highlighting English instruction, arts camps and other ministries to both Christian and Muslim Egyptians.

In closing, Anis asked American Christians to pray for:

-An end to the emigration of young people from Egypt’s Christian community
-Good Samaritans in Egyptian society
-All churches in the Middle East

The saga of Uganda’s proposed toughened anti-sodomy law and the American Evangelical connection with it drags on, even as laws and punishments of as great or greater severity continue on in the Middle East, largely unremarked on.

Like many African and other non-western countries, Uganda has had a sodomy law on its books for many years. A legislative proposal in 2009 would have increased penalties to death for “aggravated” homosexual activity, which include activity by HIV positive persons, or with minors, and increased penalties generally to include acts committed outside Uganda, and mandatory reporting of homosexual activity or support for such activity. The bill also denied the claim commonly advanced by homosexual activists that sexual orientation is immutable and noted international pressure to impose “sexual promiscuity” on Uganda.

Intense international pressure indeed quickly followed leading the government to propose dropping the death penalty. However, the bill continues to be advanced; the Speaker of the Parliament sought to pass it in 2012 and the bill is on the legislative agenda for 2013.

Uganda reasonably has a historical background which makes the debate about sodomy especially intense domestically, and contributes to the confrontation when faced with international pressure. The famous Ugandan Martyrs, 22 young men who were pages of the king of the native state of Buganda, were put to death in the late nineteenth century for their refusal to submit to the sexual advances of the king, and refusal to renounce Christianity. More recently, Uganda was one of a number of sub-Saharan African countries that suffered severely from the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and continues to cope with the threat of AIDS, with considerable success, although controversially, by emphasizing sexual abstinence and fidelity before the use of condoms.

Part of the controversy has been criticism of American Evangelical Christian leaders for inspiring or supporting the bill. This line was taken by such liberal sources as the New York Times. Yet it seems that Uganda was under pressure to eliminate its existing sodomy law as far back as 2007, while WorldNetDaily reported that advocates of liberalization were making the common (and inaccurate) claim that international conventions require it. The bill originating in 2009 referred specifically to international pressure, and the defense of traditional culture in Uganda. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California notably opposed the measure, for which he was in turn criticized by Ugandan pastors. Currently some American social conservative organizations continue to offer support for Uganda’s efforts to maintain traditional morality. And some Evangelical spokesmen also support the proposed sodomy bill, noting that its death penalty has been eliminated, and that enforcement in African nations is often less severe than the letter of the law. This was certainly the case with morals legislation in the United States, now eliminated as far as homosexuality is concerned by the Supreme Court’s Romer and Lawrence decisions, and threatened generally by those decisions.

The attention of the western press to Uganda’s sodomy law and American social conservative involvement with it is in striking by contrast to the lack of attention to more severe penalties for sodomy existing and accepted in the Muslim world. This includes both actual executions for sodomy and extra-judicial killings and attacks, and arises in part from the increasing use of sharia law in majority Muslim countries, according to which sodomy is a capital crime. Iran, which instituted an Islamic state more than 30 years ago, is a prime example of a fully Islamic legal system and its treatment of homosexual behavior, while Human Rights Watch provides accounts of extra-legal attacks in Iraq where no sodomy law existed. Passionate commitment to orthodox Islam and sharia law shows no real signs of subsiding in the Muslim world, and indeed it has been noted that it is more characteristic of the young than the old among Muslims. This means that the implementation of sharia law and its severe penalties reasonably will be with many Muslim majority nations for years to come, including the penalties for sex crimes. Indeed, sharia’s effects reasonably will be felt in Europe as enclaves of Muslims there continue to grow while the native European population declines from a low birth rate. Yet it is not to be expected that there will be criticism of Muslim laws or practices as intense or sustained as that against social conservatives in the West. Like homosexuality, Islam is considered a “victim” category by the western left, disinclining many to criticize it, while in those jurisdictions where there are restrictions on speech criticizing protected groups, even stating the truth can be a crime. This was well shown by the case of Lars Hedegaard in Denmark, prosecuted for accurately describing the abuse of women that occurs in Muslim countries.

If we step back and look at the mainstream outcry against the proposed Ugandan law and the claimed American Evangelical involvement in it, we see that the proposed law is in line with past sodomy statutes, carrying strong penalties, likely sporadically enforced, and existing in large measure to make a social statement that acceptable social bounds are those of traditional morality. It can even be seen as a courageous attempt to respond to the juggernaut of social radicalism that the western left is advancing across the world through western governments, the United Nations, and NGOs. It hardly bears comparison to the widespread use of traditional Muslim penalties against sodomy that continue to be vigorously enforced.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has elected a “moderate” successor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, infamous for his threat-laced apocalyptic rhetoric. All the candidates naturally had been screened by Iran’s ruling clerics, who have iron-fistedly retained power remarkably now for 34 years, since the Ayatollah Khomeini chased the Shah from power in an Islamist revolution.

The world is still grappling with the consequences Iran’s fall into a theocratic police state. There is of course Iran’s nuclear program and professed genocidal ambitions. But more widely, the Iranian Revolution presaged and arguably ignited the global rise of radical Islam. The negative shift of some Arab Spring revolts, especially the Muslim Brotherhood’s displacement of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, was also perhaps foreshadowed by the Shah’s overthrow.

Abbas Milani’s superb recent biography of the Shah tells much of the story. Contrary to Islamist and leftist lore, the Shah was not unilaterally restored to power in 1953 by a CIA coup with British help. Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s man in Iran at the time, was happy to accept credit, adding to his legendary name and enabling years of commercial interests with the Shah’s regime. But the erratic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a secular nationalist trying to depose the constitutional monarch, self destructed by simultaneously scaring the army, business interests and religious clerics back into the young Shah’s arms. Supporting the Shah’s return was a fifty something year old Khomeini, disturbed like others by Mossadegh’s support by Iran’s Soviet supported communist Tudeh Party.

The Shah, who professed to be a believing Muslim and an instrument of God despite his imbibing, womanizing, and affinity for Western culture, thereafter saw clerics as allies. The Tudeh, along with nationalists, were the main threat to his power, he thought, even until his death after his second and final exile, when he imagined that Khomeini was a Soviet tool. Though he was not a particularly cruel or indecent man by historic standards, the hundreds of political opponents executed by his regime across nearly forty years are a fraction of the butcher rate of his Islamist successors. His regime was religiously tolerant, relatively friendly to women’s rights, and during its early years paid lip service to democracy.

There was also growing wealth thanks to oil and industrialization, amid fantastic increases in both education and living standards. The Shah, engorged by petro dollars and well armed by the U.S. (although never as much as he wished), became grandiosely over-confident and politically delusional. Surrounded by yes men, and distracted by cancer, he made notoriously bad decisions throughout his final decade, including creation of one party rule. He had encouraged and subsidized the clergy while inhibiting the creation of secular civil society that might have favored democracy and perhaps a constitutional monarch.

Jimmy Carter’s Administration became the Shah’s chief enabler towards political suicide, pushing him into ostensible human rights reforms from, by then in the late 1970s, a position of weakness. The Shah’s retreats, which included the arrests of faithful allies, emboldened his Islamist enemies while discouraging his supporters and moderate opponents, including moderate clergy who rightly feared Khomeini. One prime minister, explaining the regime’s self-destructively ending subsidies for clergy, which further pushed them towards the Ayatollah, claims the cutoff was ordered by President Carter.

The demise of Carter and the Shah are inextricably linked. The Carter appointed U.S. ambassador to Iran cluelessly believed that rule by Khomeini would be stabilizing. In the end, the Shah was discouraged away from a military crackdown for which some generals pleaded, and encouraged to quit the country. One candidate for prime minister, although a longtime opponent, pleaded for the Shah to remain, knowing the army and security services would melt away in his absence. Often passive, and inclined to retreat when under pressure, while also excessively emotionally dependent on U.S. favor (he was actually giddy after a phone call from Carter), the Shah foolishly ignored the pleas.

Unlike far more hideous despots who have lived lavishly and unmolested in long exiles, such as Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa, Mengistu Haile Mariam, or Baby Doc Duvalier, the Shah was permitted no rest during his ailing year of remaining life. Former allies like Britain and Germany would not welcome him, and Morocco pushed him out after a brief sojourn. Mexico tolerated him briefly, as did Panama. All succumbed to fear of the new Islamic Republic of Iran, bristling with oil and terror. Even the U.S. surrendered to Iranian pressure, exacerbated by the Iranian invasion and one-year occupation of the U.S. Embassy. Only Egypt’s Anwar Sadat boldly welcomed the Shah, personally greeting him at the airport with military honors. Tearfully and apologetically the Shah told Sadat: “I have done nothing for you.” Besides being classy, Sadat wanted to demonstrate resolve against Islamists both in Iran and Egypt. For his courage, Sadat was assassinated one year after presiding over the Shah’s funeral in 1980.

Carter in 1977 had spent New Year’s Eve with the Shah in Iran, explaining in his toast: “I asked my wife, ‘With whom would you like to spend New Year’s Eve?’ And she said, ‘Above all others, I think, with the Shah and Empress Farah.’ So we arranged the trip accordingly and came to be with you.” Carter added: “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” Turning to his host, Carter gushed: “This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”

When pressed to allow the dying monarch into the U.S. for medical care in 1979, Carter snapped to his National Security Advisor: “F—k the Shah.” The Iranian hostage crisis temporarily uplifted Carter in public opinion with an upsurge in patriotism, helping Carter stave off Teddy Kennedy in the Democratic presidential primaries. But the ongoing humiliation helped to ensure his ultimate defeat by Ronald Reagan.

Maybe the Shah will be remembered as a sort Czar Nicholas, fecklessly facilitating a murderous revolution that would threaten the whole world for decades. The biographer, Milani, was himself briefly a political prisoner under the Shah, sharing cells with later henchmen of the Islamist regime. He quickly fled back to the U.S. when he could, surely knowing his fate under the new theocratic police state would be far worse. His book is an excellent aid to understanding where Iran was as a preamble to where it is and tragically where other majority Muslim nations under Islamist threat may be.